Projects

The PPI Center for Funding America’s Future works to promote a fiscally responsible public investment agenda that fosters robust and inclusive economic growth. We tackle issues of public finance in the United States and offer innovative proposals to strengthen the foundation of our economy and build shared prosperity.

Technological innovation is the main force driving job creation, productivity growth, and living standards. Progressives should aim to stimulate public and private investment in new enterprises and diffuse innovation across the entire economy.

With Washington stalemated by partisanship and polarization, the most important governing innovations today are happening in America’s metro regions. PPI advocates for a new “progressive federalism” that decentralizes political power and resources to metro leaders.

An open global economy boosts U.S. growth, supports good jobs, and enhances the buying power of American consumers. PPI advances policies that help American producers and workers to tap into global commerce, while assuring that trade’s substantial benefits are more broadly shared.

America needs a 21st century model of public education geared to the knowledge economy. Charter schools are showing the way, because they provide autonomy for schools, accountability for results, and parental choice among schools tailored to the diverse learning styles of children. David Osborne’s book, Reinventing America’s Schools, explores the new paradigm of public education that is emerging to fit the realities of the 21st century.

America’s civil justice system is a “public good” that should produce predictable, accurate and just results. The PPI Center for Civil Justice seeks to defend the integrity of our legal system from litigation abuse and efforts to bypass legislatures to make policy in the courts.

Regulatory accumulation – the relentless layering of new rules atop old ones over decades – can smother economic innovation and investment. Continuously improving the regulatory environment for entrepreneurship and growth is integral to progressive efforts to make government work better.

Government anti-poverty programs and charities must modernize the way they deliver social services. By embracing technological innovation, costly and time consuming bureaucratic barriers can be broken down and millions of disadvantaged Americans can become their own case managers.

America must innovate its way to clean growth. Rejecting both climate denial and fantasies of 100 percent renewable power, we need a realistic transition to a low-carbon economy that taps next generation nuclear technology and carbon capture techniques as well as wind, solar and water power.